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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/28188828">until we meet again</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/leoperidot/pseuds/leoperidot'>leoperidot</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Avatar: The Last Airbender</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>(it's our best boy :j), Angst, Big Brother Sokka (Avatar), Chronic Pain, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Injury Recovery, Minor Aang/Katara, Minor Bato/Hakoda (Avatar), Minor Original Character(s), My fic I do what I want, POV Sokka (Avatar), Post-Canon, Stubborn Katara (Avatar), bc i can't not, i love her... i love him... i love their sibling relationship So Much !!!, i stole some stuff from lok and the comics but also ignored other stuff, i wrote this in less than 2 days and it feels kinda off, if the timeline doesn't make any sense then that's on me, implied adhd sokka, semi lok compliant, sorry if the Sad doesn't quite hit, uhh also i didn't do literally any age math so</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-12-20</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-12-20</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-10 21:54:41</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Teen And Up Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>Major Character Death</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>5,046</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/28188828</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/leoperidot/pseuds/leoperidot</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>“I’ll only be gone three days,” she says into his shirt. “You’ll hardly notice I’m gone.”</i>
  <br/>
  <i>Sokka lets go. Rebalances himself awkwardly on his crutches. “I’ll miss you.”</i>
  <br/>
  <i>She waves him off. “Listen to Ming Wen,” she tells him as she climbs up to take Appa’s reins. “She’s not trying to hurt you.”</i>
  <br/>
  <i>“I resent that!” Sokka calls.</i>
  <br/>
  <i>Katara doesn’t look back.</i>
</p><p> </p><p> </p><p>or: a chronicle of sokka and katara's goodbyes through the years</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Katara &amp; Sokka (Avatar), Minor or Background Relationship(s), Sokka/Suki (Avatar)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>18</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>62</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Collections:</b></td><td>MMEU Winter Solstice Exchange 2020, Meteor Mutual Club Extended Universe: The Originals</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>until we meet again</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><ul class="associations">
      <li>For <a href="https://archiveofourown.org/users/idleoaths/gifts">idleoaths</a>.</li>



    </ul><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>did my best to have this done in time LMAO hope you enjoy!!</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>
  <b>1. the beginning</b>
</p><p>The first time they say goodbye, they hardly realize they’re saying it.</p><p>It’s in the messy few weeks after the war ends, somewhere between healing sessions and meetings on troop removal Zuko has to be wheeled into and plans for Zuko’s coronation and one day, Katara takes Appa and goes to meet a group of Northern healers in a refugee camp outside Ba Sing Se.</p><p>“Yugoda told me I still have to sharpen my skills,” she says, by way of explanation. The sun is barely above the horizon but it’s already hot.</p><p>“Good to know you’ve been working on me with unsharpened skills this whole time,” Sokka grumbles.</p><p>She kicks him in the shin that isn’t injured.</p><p>“Ow, Katara! I’m wounded!”</p><p>“Stop being an ass,” she advises, then throws her arms around him.</p><p>Sokka breathes in the smell of her hair—like the citrusy soap they all smell like, now. It’s still a little damp, she must’ve washed it early this morning. Sokka’s barely rolled out of bed.</p><p>“I’ll only be gone three days,” she says into his shirt. “You’ll hardly notice I’m gone.”</p><p>Sokka lets go. Rebalances himself awkwardly on his crutches. “I’ll miss you.”</p><p>She waves him off. “Listen to Ming Wen,” she tells him as she climbs up to take Appa’s reins. “She’s not trying to hurt you.”</p><p>“I resent that!” Sokka calls.</p><p>Katara doesn’t look back.</p><p>*** </p><p>Katara wasn’t exactly right. Sokka does notice her absence. </p><p>Not that he’d ever admit it, but he does.</p><p>***</p><p>Their next few goodbyes are a lot like this, as messy weeks stretch into a messy couple of months, months of peace talks and treaties and endless welcome dinners for ambassadors from one Earth Kingdom province or another. Months of Katara taking off around the world, with the Northern healers or Aang or even Toph and Suki.</p><p>Months of Sokka not really getting better. Two crutches turns to one, and then none, and then one again, then none again. Nothing helps, not water healing, not the inhumane metal braces the Fire Nation healers force on him at one point, not the stretches or the strength building or anything. No crutches turns to one finely-carved wooden cane, presented to him by a bashful Zuko and a pissed-off Katara after Sokka, embarrassingly, trips on a flight of stairs in front of the ambassador from the State of Yi and sprains his fragile ankle.</p><p>Zuko got <i>shot through with lightning</i>, Sokka thinks at every ambassador dinner or negotiation or treaty signing he’s invited to, and he’s been up and walking and doing Fire Lord-y stuff for months. One broken leg, and Sokka is out of commission entirely.</p><p>Ming Wen, his physical therapist, says it’s a mental block. Tells him he’s too afraid of walking on his own, and that’s why he can’t do it.</p><p>Ming Wen, Sokka thinks, is full of shit, and possibly a sadist.</p><p>He <i>wants</i> to walk again. He wants it so badly. Wants to go home and hunt and fish with the men of his tribe. Wants to stride into a room on two strong feet and command authority the way his dad can, and Zuko and Katara and Suki and even <i>Aang</i> can. </p><p>His dad tells him to take his time. That healing doesn’t happen in a straight line. </p><p>His steps are shambling. His left foot drags. His ankle burns from the effort of trying to pick it up. Ming Wen’s eagle eyes pin him down, and her sharp voice tells him it’s all in his head.</p><p>His sister goes off to heal war-torn humans and war-torn nations. He says goodbye to her and stays in the Fire Palace, re-learning how to walk.</p><p>***</p><p>They return, finally, <i>finally</i>, to the South Pole just as winter starts its slow creep in.</p><p>The little boys all flock to Sokka, of course. They crowd around him, hang off him, ask him a million questions: <i>did you really get to fight firebenders</i> and <i>what’s in your hand</i> and <i>aren’t canes for old people</i> and <i>was it scary</i>.</p><p>Katara might have a job to do with the Northern healers and all the freed prisoners, but Sokka has a job to do, and he can do this, he can talk to kids, he can be useful like this. He sits them all down in a circle and spins stories until they’re falling asleep and tries not to feel the throbbing pain in his knee, his ankle, his foot, or think about the particular Look Ming Wen gave him when he told her he was going home, right before she said, “Cold can really aggravate injuries like yours.”</p><p>He doesn’t think about it. He tells the kids stories from when he was brave.</p><p>*** </p><p>“Sokka?”</p><p>Sokka looks up from his diagrams with a start. Greasy, stringy hair falls into his eyes—he needs to re-tie his wolftail, needs to wash his hair. He needs to stand up, stretch out his knees. How long has he been sitting here? Katara’s at the door. “What do you want?”</p><p>“Aang and I are going to Yu Dao in a couple weeks,” she says, picking her way over the papers strewn all over the ground. Sokka’s invention hut, as they’ve dubbed it, was built more for everyone else’s sanity. “You could come, if you wanted.”</p><p>It’s the dead of winter, just past the solstice. It’s bitterly cold, dark at all hours, and of course Sokka is used to it, he grew up here, but he’s—Different. Now. The cold is more difficult. (Ming Wen was right.)</p><p>Sokka pushes his hair back into its wolftail—he <i>really</i> needs to wash it—and shrugs. “It’d be a diplomatic visit?”</p><p>“I mean, yeah, but—”</p><p>“I feel like I kind of proved how useless I am at diplomacy a while ago.” He taps the head of his cane to remind Katara of how he set the Southern Water Tribe and Earth Kingdom negotiations back two weeks with one particularly unhelpful tumble in front of the representative from Yi. </p><p>“Aang’s going to be doing all of that, dumbass,” she says. “I’m just going for fun.”</p><p>Sokka makes a face. “Spare me the oogies.”</p><p>Katara rolls her eyes with an impressively world-weary sigh. “You’re so gross. Forget I ever asked,” she says, and goes to leave. Then stops in the door. Turns around. “Are you . . . doing okay?”</p><p>Sokka pauses, uneasy under her concerned gaze.</p><p>When it’s clear he’s not going to respond, she fills up the silence: “Dad and Bato are worried. You spend all your time holed up here, and you look miserable, but you don’t want to go anywhere else, and you don’t want to talk to anyone, and I don’t know what I’m supposed to do—” </p><p>Sokka huffs. “Fine. I’ll fucking come to Yu Dao if it’s so important to you—”</p><p>“This isn’t about that,” she says with irritated finality. “I don’t care if you come to Yu Dao or not. I mean, I do, but—I don’t want you to suffer in silence like it’s <i>noble</i>. We’re worried about you.”</p><p>Sokka chews on the inside of his lip.</p><p>After a heavy silence and too much deliberation for something so mundane, Sokka admits, “I want to go to Kyoshi Island.” </p><p>***</p><p>Katara and Aang fly him there on Appa on their way to Yu Dao, and after Katara helps him down onto the docks, she gives him a hug so hard it nearly knocks him off balance.</p><p>“Take care of him for me,” she calls to Suki as she climbs back up on Appa.</p><p>“Will do,” Suki calls back, and pulls him into a hug of her own.</p><p>Kyoshi Island’s not perfect, and it certainly isn’t home, but it is close. Suki is her same wonderful self she’s always been. The Warriors are kinder to him than they need to be. And when spring starts to set in, the sun lifting itself higher and warmer in the sky and flower buds pushing themselves up from the rocky soil, hard knots of pain, which Sokka had become accustomed to, start to loosen from his left leg, and he finds it less of a dead weight than it had been. One of the Warriors recommends a strengthening exercise for his ankle that doesn’t make him feel like he’s trying to support a glacier on a splintery toothpick. His steps become more and more sure.</p><p>Kyoshi Island isn’t home, and he goes home in the summer, because he misses it. But one bright afternoon, when he and Katara are out fishing, just like the old days, he clears his throat and says, “Can I ask you something?”</p><p>“Of course,” Katara replies, languidly bending a fist-sized globe of seawater between her hands.</p><p>“Do you think it’s a crazy idea to—um.” He swallows hard. “To stay on Kyoshi?”</p><p>She pauses. Freezes the water. Looks at him with hesitation. </p><p>“I—It’s not like—” He sighs. “I like it there. It’s not <i>home</i>, but—but it’s nice. And the, um.” He chews on the inside of his lip, looks away from her, mumbles the next part in shame. “The cold is hard. To deal with.”</p><p>Katara makes a little “<i>oh</i>” noise and puts her hand gently on his good knee. “I get that.”</p><p>Sokka scoffs. “I mean, I’m—I should—I should stay here, it’s—it’s stupid—”</p><p>“No, it’s not,” she says. And smiles. “You should go. You won’t even be that far away.”</p><p>Sokka nods. Turns away, because her face is so earnest that he doesn’t quite know what to do with it. After a few minutes, he spears a fish. And grimaces. “I might have another question. Promise you won’t . . .” He waves a hand vaguely. “Freak out, or anything.”</p><p>Katara gives him a bemused look.</p><p>He huffs out a sigh. “Just . . . Just don’t be weird about it. Okay?”</p><p>“I’ll try.”</p><p>“How did you—” He purses his lips, blows out a frustrated breath from his nose. The question sounds ludicrous, even in his head. “Never mind.”</p><p>“What is it?” Katara asks, mischief on her face.</p><p>He sighs. “Tui’s gills.” He should have known better than to involve his little sister. “How did you . . . How did you know Aang was—I don’t know, like. Like, the one. For you. Or whatever.”</p><p>Katara positively <i>squeals</i>. And pounces on him like a puma-lion, which rocks the boat dangerously—“Get off,” he grumbles, refusing to hug her back.</p><p>“You have to tell me <i>everything</i>,” she says. “Are you gonna propose?”</p><p>“We’re seventeen, so no,” he says firmly. “Get <i>off</i> me, you’re going to capsize this boat.”</p><p>She relents, but won’t tear her giant grin off her face. “Sokka’s in lo-<i>ove</i>,” she sings. Sokka grumbles his annoyance and keeps watching for fish.</p><p>The next time he gets on the ferry to Kyoshi, she squeezes him tight, tight, tight, and says, “Say hi to Suki from me!” </p><p>“Shut up,” he grouses, but his heart is warm.</p><p>*****</p><p>
  <b>2. the middle</b>
</p><p>“Well, this is lovely,” Katara exclaims, looking around the airy, sunlit living room. Bumi, who’s strapped to her back in a fur-lined papoose, gurgles his agreement.</p><p>Suki sets down the box she’s carrying in and comes over to snake her arm around Sokka’s waist. “He chose well,” she says, and plants a kiss on him. Sokka smiles into it, and when they break apart, he leans his head against her shoulder. He can’t believe his luck. </p><p>“The views are incredible,” Aang says.</p><p>“I know!” Suki replies.</p><p>“The bedroom window faces south,” Sokka tells Katara, “and it overlooks the water. I can practically see home.”</p><p>Katara grins. “You’re so sentimental.”</p><p>Sokka rolls his eyes. </p><p>“How are your studies?” Katara asks him then.</p><p>Sokka lights up. “Incredible,” he says. He’s been taking classes in natural science at the university in Gaoling off and on for the past couple years. It’s fantastic. One of the best decisions he’s ever made. He could talk Katara’s ear off about it for a while, but he elects not to. “It’s fantastic.”</p><p>When Aang and Katara head back to the Air Temple, Katara’s hug is quick and gentle. Sokka makes a funny face to Bumi’s inquisitive one, then blows a raspberry. Bumi’s clumsy little mouth returns the favor. </p><p>“Immature,” Katara mutters.</p><p>“Love you too,” Sokka returns.</p><p>***</p><p>Years go by. Sokka gets a degree from Gaoling; he writes a thesis on the Swamp and the spiritual power within it. Suki trains a new generation of Kyoshi Warriors, ones for whom the war is a distant memory, even some who were born after it ended. They go to the South Pole a few times a year. Katara and Aang have another kid, and another, and Sokka and Suki agree they’d prefer being uncle and aunt to being mom and dad. Katara’s elected Chief when their dad steps down, which she indubitably deserves. Sokka has good pain days and bad pain days, and tries not to let it feel like a moral failing to rest.</p><p>Adulthood, Sokka finds, fits him like a hand-me-down boot. A little wonky where another person’s foot wore indents into the soles, a little pinching in places and a little loose in others. But slowly, slowly, molding to his shape.</p><p>He can’t shake the feeling that things are going too well.</p><p>***</p><p>Things <i>are</i> going too well.</p><p>It takes eleven words in Katara’s handwriting to knock all the breath out of Sokka.</p><p>
  <i>Dad’s not doing well. Come home as soon as you can.</i>
</p><p>“What?” Suki asks softly, as Sokka collapses into the nearest chair. She wraps her arms around him from behind, reads the letter over his shoulder.</p><p>“As soon as you can” be damned, Sokka cancels everything on his schedule for the next two weeks and secures two tickets on the next ship to the South Pole.</p><p>***</p><p>He reaches their village when the sun is as high in the grey sky as it ever gets this time of year and gets a ride from Nanuq, who shows up with his tame polar bear dog and a crooked smile. </p><p>“The ice too much for you, old man?” he asks, pulling Sokka in for a hug.</p><p>“I’m too pretty to walk so far,” Sokka returns. Suki gives him a hand and hoists him up onto the polar bear dog. “How is he?”</p><p>Nanuq’s smile disappears. “Not too good,” he says, honestly. “Katara’s really worried. Uncle Bato’s convinced he’ll pull through, but . . .”</p><p>Sokka squeezes Nanuq’s shoulder. He doesn’t need to hear any more.</p><p>*** </p><p>Nanuq drops them off in front of the healing hut before heading home. In the waiting room, Aang is entertaining Bumi and Kya with airbending tricks as Tenzin sleeps in a baby carrier on the chair beside him, but he looks up and gives a wan smile when Sokka and Suki come in.</p><p>“That hall,” he says. “Last door on the left.”</p><p>Hakoda’s sleeping, when Sokka gets there. Bato too, his lanky frame folded awkwardly into the chair beside the bed. Before Sokka can take in anything more, Katara bodily pulls him out into the hall and squeezes his free hand so hard she knocks his bones together.</p><p>“It’s his heart,” she says, voice thick with tears. “His heart gave out. Sokka—”</p><p>Sokka doesn’t hesitate. He pulls her into a one-armed hug. Smooths her hair. Lets her cry into his shoulder. He does not tell her it’ll be okay.</p><p>“He’s gonna die,” Katara whispers, voice entirely broken by now. “I know it. I <i>know</i> it.”</p><p>Sokka tightens his grip on her, and on his cane, and bites back tears.</p><p>“Just like Dad, to collapse as soon as the work is done,” he says in a wobbly voice, a piss-poor attempt at a joke that only makes Katara sob harder.</p><p>***</p><p>It only takes three days for Katara’s prediction to come true.</p><p>In the wee hours of the morning, with Bato asleep on a borrowed cot by his side, Hakoda’s heart beats for the final time.</p><p>Mourning rites begin.</p><p>Sokka and Katara are by each other’s side for all of it. They sit outside Bato and Hakoda’s igloo with Bato as a team of men washes Hakoda’s body and wraps him in stark white linen. They sit side-by-side in an umiak and hold each other as Hakoda’s body is tipped into the water and is submerged with a dull splash. They pass a bone knife between them to shear each other’s hair off at the ears.</p><p>Last time, Hakoda did it for them, holding the knife so carefully and tilting their heads so gently, like he was afraid they’d shatter.</p><p>They don’t shatter. They’re made of tougher stuff now, cracked and cured and cracked again and cured again. They won’t shatter.</p><p>***</p><p>Bato goes not long after. They’d thought he might. A combination of the old, old burn wounds that had haunted him for decades and the loss of the man he’d shared his life with for longer than that. (How lucky they are, Sokka thinks, at one point, that now people die grey-haired and wrinkled, of things like cancers and broken hearts, and not in their healthy prime, struck down by Fire Nation weapons, firebender hands.) Sokka returns to the South Pole and watches Nanuq go through the motions he and Katara had traced mere months prior.</p><p>Katara hugs him tight before he gets on the ferry; he returns to Kyoshi with a hole in his heart.</p><p>*****</p><p>
  <b>3. the end</b>
</p><p>Aang and Suki are a one-two punch they aren’t expecting.</p><p>Technically being one hundred years older than his apparent age starts catching up with Aang, and he starts aging too early. Once their kids are grown, he steps back from public life, spends more time in the Southern Air Temple. Which is why it’s not such a surprise when Sokka gets another hurried, succinct letter:</p><p>
  <i>Aang is sick. It won’t be much longer. Get here before all the news vultures.<br/>
Love you,<br/>
Katara</i>
</p><p>He and Suki make it there before, in his sister’s words, the <i>news vultures</i>, and they say goodbye to their friend, just in time.</p><p>The public mourning of the Avatar is protracted and performative and ceremonial. Sokka stands by his sister’s side at all the events—not only a funeral at the Air Temple, but endless memorials and dedications throughout every nation—and he grabs her hand when he can feel her shaking.</p><p>The private grief for Aang is a lot quieter. It is mostly the five of them—not six, not anymore—unable to imagine a world without him. Katara and Sokka and Suki and Zuko and Toph, without the glue that held them together any longer. Sokka holds Katara. Katara holds her children. No one quite knows what to do, except reminisce.</p><p>It’s a few weeks in a world without an Avatar (there’s word of a girl in the Southern Water Tribe, born on the day Aang died, who was melting ice and freezing ocean within a week of her birth, but Sokka’s heart hurts too much to listen to those rumors) when Suki goes on a routine assignment up near Ba Sing Se. She says, before she leaves, “I should probably make this one of my last trips with the girls. Getting a little old to do much more than teach.”</p><p>Sokka chuckles. “Like anything in the world could make you retire.”</p><p>Suki gives a crooked, mischievous smile, and Sokka’s reminded, all at once, why he fell in love with her. “You’re right,” she acquiesces. “I love it too much.”</p><p>She leaves him with a kiss and a smile and a “I’ll be back before you know it!” and Sokka worries only as much as he always does.</p><p>The island starts to whisper, after a couple days, that something has gone wrong. There’s not a person on all of Kyoshi who isn’t related to this Warrior or friends with that one, and when no one hears from any of them for almost an entire day, then two, then three, a simmering panic sets in.</p><p>Sokka gets a telegram.</p><p>***</p><p>Katara arrives within the day, and she holds him for a long time while he breaks down.</p><p>It was an accident. An avalanche in a mountainous region west of Ba Sing Se trapped a small party of Warriors, injuring most of the party and killing only one.</p><p>“She saved us,” a younger Warrior named Mayumi tells him, when the airship carrying the rest of the warriors and Suki’s body lands outside the village. “We would’ve all been done for. She rushed us to safety.”</p><p>It should make him feel better, but it doesn’t.</p><p>They bury her with all the ceremony a longtime leader of the Warriors deserves. Sokka is told they dressed her broken body in her regalia in the casket, but he declines to see for himself. Her death was brutal. He wants the last time he saw her face to have been with her intimidating makeup and that crooked smile.</p><p>Katara cuts his hair with a bone knife. Only to the chin. It reminds him of his father, when they were young. And, painfully, of Suki.</p><p>When Katara leaves, it is just him. All alone in the seafoam green house, where the bedroom overlooks the waters to the south.</p><p>He looks in their mirror and sees an old man looking back at him. His hair is entirely grey now. His shoulders stoop. His normal glasses slide down his nose, readers perched atop his head. He’s older now, he realizes, than his father or Bato were at their deaths. He looks feeble. Like he wouldn’t be able to save anyone.</p><p>He gazes south. He misses home.</p><p>When he sleeps, then, he doesn’t dream.</p><p>***</p><p>Sokka is flagging.</p><p>He knows it, as surely as he knows his own name. His joints have been going for a while, his bad leg so bad he sometimes longs for an amputation, his good leg as bad as his bad leg was once, his hips locking, his hands gnarling until he can hardly hold his cane. Every step is painful. He falls, once, and breaks a hip, and feels as old as the hills.</p><p>Recently, he’s tired, short of breath, his appetite gone, his mind scrambled and slow. Bumi, who is stationed on the Earth Kingdom mainland just a ferry’s ride away from Kyoshi, checks up on him now, every so often. After that fall, they never leave Sokka alone for too long. It’s to make sure he hasn’t died in his sleep, Bumi jokes, but Sokka’s realizing with dawning certainty that it’s slowly becoming less and less joking.</p><p>He can’t hold a pen any longer, but to have Bumi write the letter would be cruel. Sokka limps into town and pays a young man a few silver pieces to scribe it for him. </p><p>
  <i>Katara,<br/>
I want to come home. I’m getting very old, and I love Kyoshi, but it feels wrong to die here. I’ll set my affairs here in order, but then I’ll be on a ship headed for the South Pole.<br/>
I don’t want healers or anything. I want to go when my time comes, without trying to extend it.<br/>
I love you.<br/>
Sokka.</i>
</p><p>He sends it, and then he asks the boy to write another for him, to Bumi. (Bumi prefers the telephone, but Sokka finds it hard on his ears.)</p><p>***</p><p>“You can’t imagine I’d just be happy with this,” says Katara, who’s waiting on the docks for him.</p><p>“Hello to you too,” Sokka replies with the sort of practiced, curmudgeonly impassivity he’s gotten quite good at in his old age.</p><p>“Absolutely not, mister.” She jabs a finger into his chest, and despite her white hair and stooped posture, Sokka can see all the way back in time, to a little girl who was mad at him, too. “You’re not going anywhere. If you didn’t want healers involved, you shouldn’t have written to one. Whatever’s happening, I’ll fix it, but you can’t—You <i>can’t</i>.”</p><p>Her eyes are bright with tears.</p><p>Sokka allows his sister to pull him into a hug he can only barely reciprocate, lets her drag him into an automobile that drops them outside her healing hut, acquiesces as she cajoles him fiercely and lowers him gently into the tub.</p><p>Her diagnoses, after what feels like hours, are not far off from what he expected: arthritis, osteoporosis, the general breakdown of old age. Less predictably, she finds tumors buried deep inside his lungs.</p><p>And she tells him she can shrink them, because water healing can do that, and she tells him there’s medicines, and she tells him he can survive this, but he still isn’t certain he wants to.</p><p>He agrees to the water healing, but nothing else. If Katara can rid him of the cancer, he’s all right with that, but he won’t take the medicines she recommends, because the side effects sound far worse than the illness and he doesn’t think there’s enough life left in him worth saving at that cost. And if she can’t, well, she can’t.</p><p>***</p><p>Weeks go by. The tumors shrink, and then they grow. She rids him of one, and another pops up in its place. He feels better, and then he doesn’t.</p><p>Kya’s around sometimes, and Sokka appreciates her presence, much calmer than her mother’s. She brings a radio by, and they listen to the Harbor City stations. Sometimes Sokka likes her kind of music, and sometimes he doesn’t get it, and she laughs at his critiques. They play pai sho, when Sokka’s hands can manage it. They talk, when he can’t. She smiles when he kisses her cheek and calls her <i>Mom</i>. He wishes, as he has for decades, that he had more memories of her namesake to give her. </p><p>Her hair is greying. Sokka doesn’t know where the time has gone.</p><p>There’s a tumor, Katara tells him after nearly three months of this, high up in his right lung. It refuses to shrink, but if it grows more, it’ll stress his heart.</p><p>“If we keep up this regimen of water healing,” she says, her hand strong and sure on top of his knobbly, pain-ridden one, “I can keep its size down so it won’t grow too close to your heart. You’re getting to the point where you’re going to need help breathing, but there’s devices for that, oxygen tanks that can push air into your lungs. People can live long, full lives now while surviving something like this, I promise—”</p><p>“Katara,” Sokka says, his voice somewhere between gentle and weak. “Stop talking.”</p><p>She shuts up.</p><p>He clears his throat. “It’s all right. You can . . . You can let it go.”</p><p>“Sokka.”</p><p>He shakes his head. “I’ve had a good run.”</p><p>“You’re only seventy-five,” Katara says. “You could live another decade. More. You—”</p><p>Sokka shakes his head. “You know what I said. In my letter. I don’t want that.”</p><p>Katara purses her lips the way she always does when she disagrees but doesn’t think it wise to fight. “Okay,” she says. “Fine.”</p><p>***</p><p>Sokka hangs on long enough for Katara’s kids to come home. Bumi takes a leave of absence from the United Forces. Tenzin brings his lovely wife, Pema, and their daughter, Jinora, who’s barely a year old and spends most of her time looking around at the world with bug-eyed curiosity. Zuko even pays a visit; now that he’s not the Fire Lord, he can do things like visit an ailing friend without it becoming an international incident.</p><p>They all talk in hushed voices around him. Because that is what one does, around a dying man.</p><p>Sometimes, moonlight filters into his room just so, and he thinks of a young woman, decades and decades ago, another death, another life. </p><p>“Yue,” he tries once, but doesn’t have anything to say.</p><p><i>Was she scared?</i> he wonders, but he can answer that question. She was a sixteen-year-old girl in the crossfire of a war, confronted suddenly with the prospect of giving her life for the world. She had to be terrified, out of her wits.</p><p>Sokka’s not terrified. He’s tired.</p><p>Katara’s the most constant presence by his bedside. The others come and go, but she stays. Gives him reports on the weather, or politics, or news from home. Brings him food and doesn’t say anything when he doesn’t eat it. Lets him sleep.</p><p>“Jinora said her first word this morning,” she reports one day. “Sea prune. She was pointing at an ocean kumquat, but, you know.”</p><p>Sokka chuckles hoarsely. “Smart baby.”</p><p>Katara smiles without it reaching her eyes.</p><p>They sit in silence for a little while longer. As they usually do, nowadays, but it’s more tense now.</p><p>“It won’t be long,” Katara says, to break the silence.</p><p>Sokka gives a creaking sigh. “It won’t,” he agrees. He can feel it.</p><p>More silence.</p><p>“I never thought I’d be the one to outlive all of you.”</p><p>“There’s still Zuko,” Sokka points out.</p><p>“He doesn’t count. He’ll live to be a hundred and twenty on spite alone.”</p><p>Sokka gives a quiet, wheezing sort of laugh. Katara smiles thinly.</p><p>Still more silence.</p><p>“I thought it’d be you,” he admits. “I hardly expected to live past twenty.”</p><p>“Don’t say that.”</p><p>“It’s the truth.” He thought, in fact, he’d die at fifteen. Was certain of it, for those few harrowing moments. The fact that he got away with only a half-destroyed leg was sheer, dumb luck. </p><p>“Well,” Katara says, after a too-long pause. “I’m glad you made it.”</p><p>Sokka smiles. A real one. “I am, too.”</p><p>***</p><p>The last time they say goodbye, it’s been a long time coming.</p><p>Katara holds her brother’s hand, pushes his white hair out of his face. His breathing is labored, rattling and slow, his pulse weak under her fingers.</p><p>She’s done this before, has watched over her grandmother and her father and her step-father and the love of her life as they lay dying. Now, her brother is waning. She holds his hand and watches the almost-imperceptible rise and fall of his chest. Watches it slow.</p><p>And stop.</p><p>She presses his fingers to the inside of his wrist with expertly nimble fingers from a lifetime of healing. Nothing.</p><p>The moon is a crescent tonight. Just barely past new. Her light, through the window, is faint but unmistakable.</p><p>“Yue,” she whispers, not quite a prayer, “take care of him, please.”</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>i wonder if u can guess who it is :j</p></blockquote></div></div>
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